Brain training games don't work

September 07, 2012 Dr. Bryan Roche

Brain training games don't work, they might be fun but the paying customer wants more than

fun, they want to raise intelligence levels (IQ) to help them in their education, work and life.

All those brain training gaming products mentioning the word “brain” and featuring

Professors in the logo could not possibly make you Smarter. Your intelligence is built on a

very broad skill set involving more than stimulating your brain with a few fun games.

Becoming more intelligent is not that easy! The clue is in the fact that none of the big game

developers or online training companies claim to make their users more intelligent. It’s a

convenient misunderstanding produced by clever advertising. It also plays on people’s

inherent desire for easy solutions to difficult problems, such as how to do better in school or

business.

A recent review paper in The Psychologist shows that no study has ever shown a rise in IQ

following the use of any so-called brain training product. And yet these games sell by the

millions. What is more properly called “cognitive training” (rather than brain training) by

scientists does have some small effects on memory or other skills targeted directly by these

training programs. These programs are most often used with ageing or brain damaged people.

But they do not seem to have any effects beyond teaching the skills they teach. So for

example, if you want to improve your memory… guess what you should do! Practice

remembering stuff. But cognitive training has no general effects on your overall intelligence.

Training Your Brain Does Work.

The only way to train your brain to raise intelligence levels is to identify the skills that

underlie ALL of our intelligence. And those skills are called relational skills. Improving ones

relation skills over a period of time using relational skills training available at

RaiseYourIntelligence.com has been proven to raise general intelligence by a considerable

degree.

Don’t be fooled by clever advertising. Just because something was scientifically developed

does not mean it works! The word “science” is easy to use but the real science of identifying

the basic building blocks of intelligence took researchers three decades and the evidence that

relational training (known commercially as SMART training) makes us more intelligent is

publicly available in the scientific journals. If you want to know if your brain training

program works, ask the developers where the evidence is that it makes you more intelligent.

Don’t let them fob you off with indirect evidence produced by OTHER researchers that it

SHOULD make you more intelligent. Some publicly available evidence points to that

relational training makes you more intelligent. SMART from RaiseYourIQ is NOT a brain

training game; it is a brain training course using relational skills developed by RaiseYourIQ

from our own research, working with parents, teachers, psychologists and communities.